When people write about inner-city public schools, they like to use fun metaphors such as “the 3 R’s” or “an apple for the teacher.” But let’s skip the metaphors, because the majority of children who attend inner-city public schools have no idea what metaphors are. Let’s just tell the truth.
Inner-city public schools suck.
They suck up resources and don’t deliver for their students.
They suck up money and overpay teachers who don’t care about the children.
They suck up opportunity for their students and instead deliver them from the teachers unions to the police unions, and then to the court employee unions, and ultimately to the correctional officer unions.
And practically no one cares.
I’m from New York, so corruption doesn’t surprise me. A seminal moment in my life came when I was 17 and I asked a construction worker how long it would be until the subway project he was working on would be completed.
His response: “How old are you, kid?”
So if you tell me that some public workers’ unions featherbed jobs, or slow-walk projects, or otherwise waste public money, I’ll just shrug my shoulders and get on with my day.
If you tell me that the Mafia charges a 2% tax on construction projects in the metropolitan area and delivers substandard concrete for highway rebuilding, so that the highways will crumble and need to be rebuilt, I’ll just watch another Sopranos episode and tell myself, “Fuggedaboudit.”
But if you tell me that teachers unions are responsible for the terrible schools monopolizing low-income neighborhoods, and that they do everything they can to prevent competition, I’ll be disgusted.
And I am disgusted. Corruption that harms children is a highway to hell.
The national teachers unions are among the Democratic Party’s largest supporters, in terms of money, manpower, and delegates at their national conventions.
They fight ruthlessly against anything that threatens their hammerlock on schools in poor neighborhoods.
Vouchers? No way.
Charter schools? They go to war against charter schools.
Accountability? They can’t even spell the word, let alone live up to it.
A college friend of mine started an inner-city charter school to help black elementary school boys get the academic preparation to make it to college. He told me that the two biggest enemies of the school were the local teachers union and the Democratic Party.
Shameful.
The dismal outcomes, the wasted money, the wasted lives of innocent children all come to the fore on the rare occasions that someone inside the system speaks out.
That happened this past week when Nikole Hannah-Jones, the mother of a young black girl, wrote an essay in the New York Times about her decision to send her daughter to an inner-city public school.
Her daughter witnessed teachers who didn’t teach, homework assignments that went ungraded, cafeteria workers who ignored students fighting, and high grades passed out like Halloween candy. The daughter only discovered how poorly she had been “educated” when she failed a high school math test for which she mistakenly believed she was fully prepared.
The Democratic/Socialistic Party today stands for the destruction from the inside of our society, our economic system, our values, our freedom, and our way of life. What better way to ensure civil collapse than to limit children from poor families to schools with no interest in helping them get ahead?
Nothing will change even if the New York Times publishes a hundred, nay, a thousand essays by a thousand aggrieved parents who naively believed that alleged cultural benefits would outweigh the academic shortcomings of our horrific inner-city public schools.
The teachers unions are way too powerful. The Democrats can’t afford to offend them. And because most of these lousy schools are found in blue cities and states, nothing will change.
Which is why I say that far too many of these children, whose potential is blunted, if not destroyed, by teachers unions, will become institutionalized with low expectations, no skills, and a complete inability to compete in a 21st-century knowledge economy.
Are there individual, idealistic, and dedicated teachers? Of course. But they’re not in charge of the educational system. The advantage takers rule the roost.
Every day’s news brings more evidence of corruption in government, business, healthcare, and a million areas of life. And it’s all unfortunate, wasteful, and immoral.
But the corruption that destroys the future of children from poor families? That’s just sinful.
The great journalist Jimmy Breslin put it, with his typical Irish gravity and syntax, “Dies the child, dies the city.”
THE SUPREME COURT BANNED RACE SORTING. COLLEGES FOUND A FIVE-DIGIT LOOPHOLE
Our inner-city children are dying intellectually. If the Democrats wanted to find out why, if they wanted to find out who’s to blame, all they’d have to do is look in the mirror.
I’m not holding my breath.
Michael Levin is a two-time New York Times bestselling author. His next novel, 2028, A Political Thriller, will be published by Morgan James in April.